User:FT2/SP1

POSSIBLE APPROACH

The community handles thousands of disputes a year. Most resolve, but many seem intractable. Users get frustrated, discouraged and angry, readers get poor information, megabytes of evidence are written, volunteer goodwill and time are wasted. After 11 years why isn't it any better?

Setting aside the simpler disputes, some disputes really are difficult:

Real world/strong feelings: - they reflect real-world issues with strong feelings
They are inherently subjective - "what is a mainstream view", "what would a balanced view look like", "is this fringe or not"
There is no "right" answer or all answers are highly divisive - naming disputes for example
They have attracted users or groups who have agendas or warring skills and are skilled at avoiding explicitly bad conduct
Toxicity/ownership - they get "owned" by a group, or disputing groups, or become "toxic".
Poor conduct feedback cycle - A cycle of poor conduct -> non-productive -> good editors driven away -> rewards tendentious and well-meaning non-encyclopedic editors -> more poor conduct (etc) and less likely to result in high standard decisions
Too little, too late - by the time they come to wide attention they are already a disaster zone.
Our dispute resolution system is fragile in some ways - it doesn't take many people to frustrate progress, we don't have formal structures to help reach difficult consensus, egregious bad conduct is needed to remove an editor from a page which takes time to prove and can be avoided with skill, we treat anyone with more than 10 edits as equal editors when their editing quality may widely differ, anyone can ask to reopen a debate... and reopen it, wearing out patience. It wasn't designed to handle these cases way back in 2001 - and at heart, it hasn't evolved much since then. (Our basic content dispute process is: discussion -> request more eyeballs -> sanctions for egregious conduct -> tire out "good" participants -> cross fingers that it magically resolves)

Wikipedia was started as a small project whose participants were online geeks, so rules could be simple and self evident. Our policies should work in theory but making them work in practice on the cutting edge of cases is notoriously hard... they simply weren't designed to anticipate these problems or a community on this scale.

Let's decide that we need to solve these. No excuses. Everyone here knows the frustration involved, so let's kick start some new thinking. What tools do we need in the arsenal to solve heavy disputes in a way that respects traditional approaches? What would such tools look like?

They should ideally draw on the wider community. They should respect our normal approaches and not fossilize content, nor create "weak points" for warring or censorship in future (content arbitration is weak this way). They should privilege editors willing to edit well, over those who can't or won't. They should ensure newcomers an equal chance to do well, if behaving productively. They should provide support for new dispute resolution methods which should be based as much as possible on consensus rather than some new "elite". They should not privilege admins (many non-admins are brilliant editors, some admins have POV or fairness issues). They should ensure productive debate in hard circumstances, hence much less patience with poor conduct but should not encourage free use of blocking. They should strategically target those features which edit warriors rely on to edit war, while having minimal impact on genuine good editorship. They should use tools lightly so we don't become "blocking happy" or bite people without a chance. Content resolution should be 100% transparent and on-wiki (there are no editor privacy issues for content). They should be robust, rely on social pressure and work mainly by good design, rather than by "enforcement" processes or a small "elite". They may respect experts but place faith in the wider community (experts can have agendas or POV like anyone else). They should be widely applicable and simple. Processes should be open to any user who shows they can edit well and in good faith. They should draw upon a wide pool of hundreds of users to ensure NPOV.

A half dozen enhancements exist that fit these requirements. Together they cover much of our outdated dispute resolution system. Two or three are radical changes to mindset that will take analysis to see how well they could help us across the board.

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking at future dispute resolution with a focus on actually improving our end product of good content in a series of op-eds. Some will be radical, some require leaps of trust, some will work "just because they will". I'll start by looking carefully at what doesn't work, what does and traps to avoid, so we can check our ideas stand true to our pillars. Users are encouraged to express interest in developing these ideas with the aim of proposing on-wiki trials - this is to have a go at real community-driven change, a starting point for people to decide we can improve it - not just an excuse to make noise in an echo chamber!

I'll start next week with "Disrupting the disruptors - an analysis of advanced edit warring", which will introduce two ideas: - Serious edit warring requires high presence and involvement, and so is itself very vulnerable in ways that don't affect anyone editing properly; and, just sometimes, our biggest problem is that conduct standards are upside down.

Catch you next week!